Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

Jomini’s prime purpose was instruction and he found Clausewitz’s theorizing overblown.

Clausewitz came to be celebrated as a greater theorist of war, but Jomini had enduring appeal to military planners. Because he developed his theories while Napoleon was at his peak, Jomini’s writing showed an optimism that is lacking in Clausewitz.

In On War, Clausewitz was attempting something very ambitious. More than a textbook for an aspiring general, this was a whole theory of war. His achievement was to develop a conceptual framework that captured war’s essence sufficiently for subsequent generations to return to it

The ambiguities and tensions in On War allowed Marxists, Nazis, and liberals to claim it as authoritative support for their own theories and strategies.

Even those who considered On War wrongheaded and out of date entered into direct competition, as if their own credibility ...

Clausewitz’s most famous dictum, that war is a continuation of policy by other means, is a charter for strategists.

The key point is that insisting on political purpose takes war away from mindless violence. This dictum does not propose that war is always a sensible expression of policy, or that the movement from politics to war is from one defined state to another. The difference lies in the violence and the sharpness of the confrontation between two opposed wills.

The challenge for politics, and therefore strategy, was to impose a semblance of rationality, in terms of the dogged pursuit of state objectives.

The key to Clausewitz’s greatness as theorist of war lay instead in the observation that was at the heart of his mature thought, that war was shaped by a remarkable trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes [war] subject to reason alone.

His theory depended on the dynamic interplay of these three factors. The trinity superseded the dictum, for it suggested that politics was not in command but one factor among three.

Politics was one source of restraint, but friction was another.

Friction helped explain the difference between war as it might be—that is, absolute and unrestrained—and actual war.

Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

Generals in charge of military organizations were doomed to disappointment.

Within the paradoxical trinity, violence and chance could still be subordinated to politics and the application of reason.

Clausewitz wrote about the need for the commander to be a military genius, but he did not necessarily mean an exceptional, once-in-a-generation individual such as Napoleon. Genius required a grasp of the demands of war, the nature of the enemy, and the need to stay cool at all times. Indeed, Clausewitz was wary of the general who tried to be too smart.

First, despite all the talk of unpredictability, not everything was a mystery.

A second factor was the unreliability of intelligence. Without a robust starting plan, occasional reports might cause an undue deviation: “Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.” Furthermore, intelligence tended to have a pessimistic bias.

Third, both sides were subject to friction, so it was a poor excuse for defeat.

The essence of good generalship was to triumph over friction, to the extent possible, through both careful planning and maintaining a presence of mind when the unexpected happened.

So size mattered. Armies were “so much alike” that there was “little difference between the best and the worst of them.” The most reliable means to success, in both tactics and strategy, was therefore superiority in numbers: “The skill of the greatest commanders may be counterbalanced by a two-to-one ratio in the fighting forces.”

This put a premium on knowing when to stop. An enemy willing and able to redouble his efforts put a final victory out of reach.

There would be temptations to capture “certain geographical points” or seize “undefended provinces,” as if they had value in themselves as “windfall profits,” but that could put the main aim at risk.

“Time which is allowed to pass unused accumulates to the credit of the defender.”

The defender operated on familiar ground, could choose his position carefully, and enjoyed short supply lines and a friendly local population, which could be a source of intelligence and even reserves.

side. According to prevailing notions of the “balance of power,” other states were likely to intervene against a determined aggressor in order to prevent it becoming too powerful. Even the strongest individual state could be defeated by an organized coalition ranged against it and determined to restore equilibrium to the international system. This too Napoleon discovered to his cost.

When it came to the offense, another important Clausewitzian concept was the “center of gravity” (Schwerpunkt).

The Schwerpunkt was “the central feature of the enemy’s power” and therefore “the point against which all our energies should be directed.”

The target might not be a concentration of physical strength but possibly the point where enemy forces connected and were given direction.

gravity. Clausewitz was of the view, almost taken for granted in his time, that once the enemy army was defeated in battle, the route to victory was clear. Without an army a state was helpless.

As for these objectives, Strachan refers to a creed of 1815, “For me the chief rules of politics [or policy] are: never be helpless; expect nothing from the generosity of another; do not give up an objective before it becomes impossible; hold sacred the honor of the state.”

Napoleon’s career warned of the consequences of relying on military victory as the sole means of achieving political objectives. He wanted complete hegemony in Europe.

As Napoleon discovered, the obvious counters to a regular army seeking a decisive battle were guerrilla warfare or reconstituted armies combining in a formidable coalition to ensure numerical superiority.

Undoubtedly a genius in battle, Napoleon lacked political subtlety. He inclined toward punitive peace terms and was poor at forging coalitions.

A war begun with limited objectives might not be fought by correspondingly limited means. Combat might be infused with the purposes of war but was shaped by armies in opposition. This created a reciprocal effect that could generate explosive forces from within, whatever the attempts to establish controls from without. We now tend to call this process “escalation.”

Clausewitz accepted that the military task should be set by the politicians. Once that had been accomplished, the military could expect the politicians to use a military victory to best advantage.

The Roman origins of the word victory located it firmly in the military sphere. Jomini and Clausewitz understood that the objective of war came from outside the military sphere.

Brian Bond noted how this raised a fundamental problem: “If strategy was a science whose principles could be learnt what was to prevent all the belligerents learning them? In that case stalemate or attrition must result.”36

Tell me how the Germans have trained you to fight Bonaparte by this new science you call ‘strategy.’ —Tolstoy, War and Peace

THE MISERIES AND privations associated with the Napoleonic Wars led to the development of an international peace movement.

This was put most succinctly by John Stuart Mill in 1848: “It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which act in natural opposition to it.”

The Prussian economist Friedrich List observed, in an argument that many

still find compelling, that free trade would result in “a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the supremacy of the predominant manufacturing, commercial, and naval power.”

He understood the impact of popular passion on how wars were fought, by undermining attempts at restraint, and he recognized nationalism as a source of war.

This went against notions of progressive civility in international affairs and added a cautionary note to demands for greater democracy. It undermined the claims of liberal reformers that war was an elite conspiracy.

This chapter discusses how this issue of war and politics was considered by two very distinctive personalities, neither of whom were liberals: the Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy, who disputed that mass armies were ever truly controlled by their generals, and the German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who explored to the full the possibilities and limitations of command.

He became increasingly annoyed at the insensitivity and incompetence of Russia’s elite and explored how literature could express the experiences of the peasantry as well as the nobility. In 1863, he began six years of work that would lead to his masterpiece, War and Peace.

Clausewitz represented much of what Tolstoy opposed. He even made a minor appearance in War and Peace.

Prussia had “yielded up all Europe to him [Napoleon], and have now come to teach us. Fine teachers!”4 Their theories were “not worth an empty eggshell.”

But Tolstoy’s wider political influence spread during the rest of the century and affected attempts to develop nonviolent strategies. His general critique had its echoes over the next century.